I don’t understand war. How an orgainzed group can take up arms against each other—it goes against all forms of common sense. I just finished watching Blood Diamond on the plane between Seattle and Narita, a film about the African conflict diamond trade. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, despite its violience.

I’ve made it a point to concentrate some of my travles in former war torn places. During my “Vagabond Tour” in 2005, I stopped in Bosnia and Croatia, members of the former Yugoslavia and war torn by a rampage of ethic cleansing. Sarajevo struck me most profoundly—even today, façades all over still remain pockmarked by the impact of bullets. Some have tried poorly to hide their scars with hasty motaring jobs, but such scars can never be fully erased. It’s common to go on a walk and find a shell of a bombed out building, wooden planks erected over the sidewalk to prevent rubble from striking pedestrians on the head.

I can’t tell you how it feels to stand on a street corner, look to your right, and see a façade densely cratered from bullets. To think: at some point in the recent past, someone stood where I was standing now, being shot at, clinging to life, maybe killed. It defies all reason. On my walks to the residential neighborhoods on the hillside, I see children playing, a stone’s throw from the overgrown grass of the hills where mines still sit. Even within the children there is a generation gap from the war.

My eyes well up just thinking about it.

At a church event recently, someone asked my pastor why God has allowed such things to past. If God is all-powerful, all knowing, and being the God that he is, why has he allowed such things to happen? I liked his answer.

God has given us the power of choice—and we have chosen poorly. But still God continues to give us a choice and I pray that just like children, we will learn from our choices and do better, next time.